on counting the cost digital divisions why the world's population risks missing out on the next evolution of the internet from russia with interest while the kremlin backed investments in venezuela are all about plus a report from senegal's currency control to see counting the cost. this is techno innovations that can change lives the science of fighting wildfires we're going to explore the intersection of hardware in humanity and we're doing it in unique way. this is a show about science no not nice scientists tonight true. it's everywhere out there landfills overflowing and for those folks down but some of our trash. could be recycled why isn't it being

down more techno investigates the problem with plastic they took a lead on the street or to oil in the ocean we have the technology on a million so why don't we use it so you don't know it will happen surprise to you because that doctor should be so morrow it is a mechanical engineer dr crystal dilworth is a neuroscientists can't buy that claim other than live in one field taurus and an entomologist that's our team and they are now let's do some science. hey guys working the techno on phil tours today we're going to be talking trash and a ton of it and joining me with this trash talk dr crystal door and dr shu some are now first up the water ball now by some estimates here in the u.s. we use fifty below. of these every year in the mist number one is that this is

going to be recycled correct actually it's probably not going to be recycled a lot of water bottles that we think are headed for recycling facility and up in landfills and there's landfills that has a really negative impacts on the surrounding communities is actually quite shocking for the material that is designed to be used over and over again actually only gets used once and what we've done is take a water bottle just like this and follow its journey after it's been lubin to see exactly what. the world is addicted to plastic. that was sold to us as the product of the future. this educational video from the one nine hundred forty s. celebrates the convenience of plastic heroin are. reading our own for.

back then it was a symbol of the modern times to come six decades later the reality is. the earth is choking on it. according to the united states environmental protection agency only nine percent of plastic is making its way into the recycling stream that's a people problem as they toured on the streets or troy in the ocean or unfortunately that's a habit that has to be stopped it's our addiction to single use plastic for fast food storage and packaging convenience that's at the root of the problem we're guilty of and we should just admit it dr steven not is a professor of materials science at u.s.c. he studies the physics and chemistry of materials like plastic seems to have been a material that was developed for convenience but we're now you know almost one hundred years later paying the price if you look at the population. the whole

problem the majority have not yet realized the magnitude of the problem. and nothing symbolizes the problem like the under present plastic water bottle americans consume water from about fifty billion bottles a year. made from the school to p. t. polyethylene terrified late to monomers ethylene glycol and purify tariff acid combine to create a polymer resulting in a lightweight strong material why then does it last all my stuff to infinity and the landfill these essentially are the same type of bonds that hold together diamond if you're conscientious enough to throw a water bottle into a blue recycle bin like we do here at techno and you probably think that water bottle is going to be turned into another water bottle but that may not necessarily be the case techno wants to find out what happens next so we followed the water bottle.

this is the massive twenty facility near los angeles california. located near a large metropolis it can take a lot of trash. if you take a football field from post to post ten feet high. fill it up with trash about a third of the. water that comes over here every day. three thousand tons a day this facility of as a glimpse into the wilds of single stream recycling because all of the recycled material it receives comes from a single source been like this convenient because all recyclables end up in one basket but there's a price you can't unscramble an egg susan collins is a manufacturing engineer who heads up a nonprofit recycling institute once materials get mixed together too much like

glass shards ending up in paper or plastic bottles ending up in the paper streamer aluminum cans ending up in the plastic stream all of that is detrimental to recycling sorting c. to be a massive component there are multiple compositions of plastic when these different plastics are blended together then the recycling become difficult to impossible that's exactly what's happening at the plenty of times that means of those who won't be turned back into another bottle but instead it will go on another journey into the secondary plastic market one of the myths is that once you place the water possible in a blue recycle bin it can actually be made back into water bottle again the technology is that why isn't it being done more you know i can't really speak to the industry what happens after you know the water bottle leaves our facility we

just make sure that the containers that come in here are recovered as much as possible so you don't know what happens to the plastic that you recover once you've given it to the broker both you know but from what we understand it there is a local market for the. for the most part lot of the material is shipped overseas mostly to be asian pacific in two thousand and fourteen the second the plastic market sent about hoff of california's plastic trash to china because it's a mix of all the different types of plastics it can only be melted down repurposed a process known as down cycling or it could be t. shirts it could be teddy bear stuffing it could be carpets. because down cycle products and. they just take a longer trip before they eventually end up in a landfill and there's another inherent problem with single stream recycling half of the country has access to recycling and the other half might have

a drop off program that might be nearby or it might be ten or twenty miles away in the u.s. we're able to see news about five to seven percent recycled content m.p.t. beverage bottles in the united states the number in germany is twenty five to thirty five percent in the you. us bottle bills are rare california is only one of six states that places a redemption value on non-carbonated p.d.t. bottles with what we have a national possible because it seems to be so successful sure it's purely for political reasons but one bottles of purchased in california consumers pay anywhere from a nickel to a dime deposit on them at checkout. we see about a million and a half customers a canadian based company replanted with seven hundred locations in the u.s. offers a plastic buyback program. there are sorts of middleman in the plastics trade they redeem bottles for deposit. the result is dramatic the recycling right in

california is typically three times higher than that of the rest of the nation here at this replanted sourcing facility they process over two million bottles a day packaging up the best quality p.t.t. these mountains of plastic oppressed cracked and then bailed among the by is this p.t. . is carbonite it's a two hundred twenty thousand square foot plant but they transform state into material from the bottles. as a mechanical engineer. i feel like a kid in a candy store that is not a good role model i know you. poor here are broken and the plastics is separated from any debris and then washed in hot water in our second stage that washes a very clearly separated stage and labels from the p.t.

volatiles is then separated into clear petey greene p.t. . the clear and p.t. is ground into flakes and washed again heated then melted and then becomes pellets . the ones who want the bottle to bottle recycling the plastic from one bottle is used to make it. nothing and often not until they even recycle the labels and casts . in patsy's they could use among the companies heavily invested in one to one. so if we get the recycled retiring up in the us you know it's very easy. hundred percent recycled material for use if you keep something in a closed loop he replacing version resources over and over and over again catches up with you in a pretty awesome way and is responsible for avoiding a whole bunch of environmental consequences.

throw away living. a promise of liberation. americans are free at last this feature and life magazine one thousand nine hundred fifty signaled the beginning of a throwaway society. if people only knew the problem that they were creating when they extolled the virtues of throwaway living this is a monster creating a peer. do you know about something. they want to extend those experiences alters oh constantly for years. these neighbors are talking trash as a group of milpitas california residents go door to door to buy the expansion of

the newbie island located in the neighboring city of san jose. they hold weekly meetings and steaks and they host town halls there is a significant odor that comes from the movie island facility sometime you know when i just go out and take a walk i just feel dizzy and i feel like story because he's like a huge bathroom you know this is so smells so bad. milpitas california a sleepy bedroom community is the gateway to silicon valley a bustling tech town of seventy thousand many citizens here say the garbage is taking over. and ruining their quality of life. i'm a real estate broker and years ago very few people would ask about otar now one hundred percent of the people that are buyers within the community are asking about the odor that is going to affect property values newbie island resource recovery

park here in san jose is a landfill operated by republic services the nation's second largest waste management company it's been taking trash since one thousand and thirty and was scheduled to close in twenty twenty five. instead today the city of san jose is not only planning to keep it open until two thousand and forty one they want to grow it from one hundred fifty feet above sea level to two hundred forty five feet increasing its capacity more than fifteen million cubic yards. we fill it and that is that is the fashion oh well i want to move out of this interview americans create about two hundred fifty million tons of trash a year. in one thousand and eighty eight there were about eight thousand landfills in america two decades later that number dropped to below two thousand spurred on by environmental and health concerns heavily populated areas started closing landfills and shipping trash to more remote regions. san francisco hauls its

trash about fifty miles across the bay to york city trash is trucked out of state to new jersey pennsylvania even as far away as ohio virginia and south carolina and until recently america was doing a brisk business selling its crap to china but now even china is larry times have changed awareness of the public is much greater about health issues now than it was when newby began nuvi is one of the largest active landfills on the shores of san francisco bay i think it's like this in america the city of milpitas filed a lawsuit against san jose over environmental impacts caused by the landfill. the bay area air quality management district which has received two thousand new b. landfill order complaints has issued newbie island five public nuisance violations related to odor issues according to a district spokesman they're still negotiating the fines. trash is a big business and an unfortunate smelly business too don lynch field is the

northern california environmental manager for a public services the community itself seems to have some concerns about this site and the odor problem that they're experiencing unfortunately we've been a little slow to address those concerns so we'd like to apologize to the community for that here at the landfill we've had order mitigation plan that we've been working on for years we get a lot of fresh refuse that comes in every day and we have order mr stations set up in strategic locations throughout the landfill that can mitigate some of the fresh orders. in addition the public says it invested heavily in the state of the art recycling facility to help divert land to list. all of the mature that we accept over a thousand tonnes a day in the bay area california comes into this facility and we diverted from the landfill so we've processed the material and removed everything it's recyclable. i think two hundred thousand tons a year are being diverted from the landfill are all forty four hundred tons of

paper and three tons of plastic ninety tons of the last thirty tons of metal every day despite a very nearly fifty percent of their annual the landfill is still growing and that causes some to look toward another possible solution. in sweden a country that those thirty three incinerators trash is burned to create fuel and what's known as waste to energy about half of their waste is recycled and the rest is parent less than one percent goes to landfill sweden is known as a world leader in waste to energy incinerators like this one which utilizes modern technology to capture and control emissions san francisco authorities tell us they have no plans to build an incinerator in the bay area instead they say they plan to increase composting and to continue to ban what they call bad designs. what is your hope for san francisco what we're trying to do is really break that addiction to possible water san francisco is the first city in the country to ban single use

water bottle from city property in the case of our ban on single use plastic water bottles the goal here is to establish a marker to lay it down in san francisco to work with other cities to do the same in the meantime however we are still a consumer and done nation republic landfill manager augustine marino says he wants to residents to know just one thing. that's the one that works in trash for a living and you hear the concerns of the citizens and i guess what you have to say to them this is not a dog you know you hear that we're very often and for us you know that that we work here every day it's not fair to call this a dog this is a modern cemetery down field we take pride in what we do here these residents say they just wish they were doing it somewhere else so this is not a day i'm just waiting for my big i'm fighting for the end. nobody's going to get is going to be the. mountains of trash piled high as the eye can see at this

landfill just outside san francisco but inside this mass scientists see potential some of this waste is organic about forty percent of landfill waste nationwide is from food that's waste that doesn't have to be there innovators are tackling that waste a program that takes food from restaurants and farms in the area turns that waste into energy and we're finding new ways to raise what we used to call we right now mark ninety percent of their waste recycling composting gabrielle is on owens a small cafe in san francisco's mission district she composts everything i'm a strong believer that i'm doing what i can and the best that i can what she's doing here on a small scale is part of a much bigger picture. if you look at what she's doing here in terms of diverting waste away from landfills and creating a recycling type of circuit here with everything that happens it else and that's

what we have to look to inspired by western europe san francisco opera owners like the financial incentives to compost. a lot of these small businesses are actually doing it for economic reasons it lowers their bill always for recycling for their garbage but overall money is a way to motivate people but it's not the only motivator when the food waste is in the landfill it decomposes. and it generates methane gas and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas john hankey the civil engineer who runs the resource recovery program in east bank with a combined solid food waste rudely quickly swatting to create fuel that has its owner very organic yes that's the term we use to describe the smell it's like a black gold. the process works like this food waste from throughout the bay area is trucked here to the east bay municipal utility district east bay mud the sewage treatment plant and

a pioneer of green power where the first plant in north america had to be commenter genial and ultimately energy confidantes. when we started the truck lease graham you claim not to found forty percent of the energy we needed to run the plants and that's pretty typical irwin's miner treatment plant today were at one hundred thirty percent of our to be and not allowed that this dollar that act that's going to the energy to the word of the land our neighbors next to ours. and what happened there were standing by a pipe that labeled heated the heated sludge is going into an anaerobic digest digester is like a human stomach so for d.n.a. material cosey into the digester and in there it's bio degraded by bacteria and they feed the solid material and that solid material is being converted into bio gas and that bio is a great renewable energy source and it's

a fuel that we use to run our engines and turbaned to generate electricity let me get this straight i have the answer and i think the energy in the fuel that i can from that and then it goes this way and you know that you're getting at the bacteria that they're turning it into energy that's correct. each digester here is about two million gallons and we have eleven of them so that's twenty two million gallons of capacity east a mud shared the technology and now other water treatment facilities in brooklyn new york and in california cities of marin thousand oaks fresno and san diego are using it for. most of us don't think about the waste whether it's flushing the toilet or throwing things in the garbage it just kind of disappears and i think as a society we've been very successful at sort of highlighting where the waste go and

i think as time goes on and the population grows and waste generation grows they will become more aware of waste generation this is a great responsibility that's when the sides have big impact and they are in the world for the next generation. so through all of this it's clear there is a problem out there which recycling with way too much pressure what can we do is consumers well and some people think it's an individual choice we just need to get better at sorting our trash and sorting our recyclables and actually following through and others think that we need to be taking a legislative approach and in san francisco if ban water bottles and government property and maybe we can do more things like that when i work in latin america glass bottles are the norm there that is what you use whenever you get a soda from a restaurant or something but the difference there is you are expected to return that glass bottle to the person and they recycle it also times they'll give you

a quarter in return but if you don't return that glass bottle you're being very rude it's like a societal norm that you are breaking i think as consumers we need to be extremely mindful of not using plastic ones so just try and you know increase the times piece of packaging and then just make sure that you trash in a bleep in once you finish with it when it comes to responsible use i mean also you think about whether or not. you're putting it in the blue bin at all i mean a lot of people just have this idea what i'm going to throw it in the trash and throw it in this bin and whatever it is it's going to disappear into the ether and now i'm absolved of all responsibility but it has to go somewhere i mean conservation of mass if nothing else really did make me more aware of how much plastic i'm actually using when used plastic straw or plastic cups only those things we just because it seems like there's so many of them we just use them once and throw more and that's the absolute is nothing like standing at the open face of a landfill and going through your head of like why i threw away that yogurt container and that i had

a water bottle this morning and my cups probably in there and you really start to realise how much of this we generate and day i'm sure you could see it and you can smell it yes doesn't it certainly a dirty job but it's an important one to tell so thank you for bringing that to us that's it for now be sure to check in so next time right here on techno dive deep into these stories go behind the scenes at al-jazeera don't go home slash techno. expert contributors on twitter facebook instagram google plus and more.

february on al-jazeera we investigate the toxic legacy of south africa's mining industry and examine exactly what is hiding beneath the oldest toxic waste africa's largest democracy heads to the polls join us for live coverage as nigeria votes al-jazeera well it showcases the best of the network's documentaries with powerful untold stories from the middle east and north africa as cubans are set to vote on the possible changes to the constitution what impact will the outcome have on the country the world sunny day witness visits ghana and sweden where community code arise by mining towns questions their heritage february on al-jazeera.

and. the first century. billions of dollars have been stolen from malaysia meet the whistleblower good supposed big deals and criminal cover. when used investigates the world's biggest heist. on al-jazeera. al-jazeera for me is different because there's a maturity about it's used in the news group generally over also the channel but the pads take the risk of a story like you'll. kill all the time i'm not going anywhere al-jazeera is setting out to give thanks to the reality on the ground that the reality on the ground can only be can you imagine the people and that's what we do not because we do well.

i don't know in the top stories around. but his right is opposition has made a new appeal to the military to allow desperately needed aid stuck on the colombian border to be let into the country but president nicolas maduro says it's a political show representative for the self declared president who. has urged the armed forces to ignore my dura saying this applies also for them and their families . that you are being a part of this aid is for you it is here for your children this is to provide.